This dissertation provides a critical analysis of transparency in the context of organizing. The
empirical material is based on qualitative studies of international cooperative organizations. The
dissertation seeks to contribute to transparency and organizing scholarship by adopting a
communication centred approach to explore the implications of pursuing ideals of transparency
in organizational relationships. The dissertation is comprised of four papers each contributing to
extant debates in organizational studies and transparency literature. The findings indicate that
transparency, in contrast to being a solution for efficiency and democratic organizing, is a
communicatively contested process which may lead to unintended consequences. The
dissertation shows that transparency is performative: it can impact authority by de/legitimating
action, shape the processes of organizational identity co-construction, and its intersection with
new media technologies can create tensions. Thus, the dissertation questions instrumental
tendencies which regard transparency as full disclosure, the opposite of secrecy, and a way to
achieve a consistent organizational identity. The dissertation provides a framework of
organizational transparency which underlines its negotiated, power-infused and paradoxical
nature.

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An Ethnographic Study of Trust, Distance, Control, Culture and Boundary Spanning within Offshore Outsourcing of IT Services

Tøth, Thomas(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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Resume:

This PhD dissertation is an ethnographic field study of the collaboration between
Berlingske Media, one of the leading media companies in Denmark, and their Indian
IT service provider, HCL – one of the largest IT service providers worldwide. The
dissertation studies the day-to-day operational collaboration between actors from the
client organization and the vendor organization in order to understand how vendor-side
actors, as individuals and as a collective, can be constructed as trustworthy
collaborators in the eyes of the client-side actors.
While trust is the theoretical epicenter of this thesis it is, in acknowledgement of the
contextual and dynamic nature of trust, subjected to an interdisciplinary analytical
framework. Thus, the four analytical chapters in Part II introduce four different factors
that influence the client-side actors’ perceptions of vendor-side actors’ trustworthiness:
distance, control, culture and boundary spanning.
The analytical conclusions are summarized in Part III of the dissertation. Based on
these analytical conclusions a number of practice-oriented suggestions on how the
client-side actors’ perceptions of the vendor-side’s trustworthiness can be improved are
presented and discussed. Furthermore, the theoretical implications are presented and
discussed.

This dissertation examines post-consumer textile waste from the fashion industry's
perspective, and addresses how business model innovation can facilitate reuse and
recycling of garments and a transition towards a circular economy of fashion. Focusing
on the emerging reuse and recycling practices of fashion brands the study builds upon
one explorative and two in-depth case studies of industry pioneers and their endeavors
of integrating reuse and recycling activities in their business models. Theoretically the
study rests on business models, business model innovation for sustainability and
circular economy.
The study seeks to provide a unique contribution as it synthesizes the theoretical and
empirical insights from the field of business model innovation and circular economy in
the context of post-consumer textile waste. By highlighting and extending the idea of
business model innovation for circular economy it makes a justification that product
end-of-life phases require attention and can include new value propositions that
companies can create, deliver and capture.
This dissertation contains three articles, each of which contributes to an improved
understanding of post-consumer textile waste management in the context of the fashion
industry and its related opportunities and challenges. The findings cover both broad
industry-level and more specific company-level discoveries. The industry-level
findings provide a general understanding of existing practices among fashion
companies while the company specific findings identify key issues and challenges of
integrating a product’s end-of-life aspects in an existing business model. Collectively,
the findings demonstrate that end-of-life management of products is an emerging field
among fashion companies and used garments can provide new value propositions for
fashion brands. The findings also illustrate that the field is in its infancy and lacks best
practices within business models, supply chain infrastructure, technological solutions
and consumer engagement. Transition towards a circular economy implies full
systemic change, and innovation not only in business models, but also in technologies,
society, policies and finance methods as well as consumer behavior. None of these
aspects can work in isolation and require that different stakeholders work in tandem.